Setting up ChatGPT ads, without surprises

You create and own the OpenAI ads account — OpenAI requires it, and Serge is built around it. This page walks the whole off-Serge part: what to have ready, the settings you cannot change later, what verification and review involve, and where the API key lives at the end. Read it once before you start and the signup is one sitting instead of three.

Who can sign up: OpenAI accepts advertisers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, and United States. Switzerland and the EU are listed as coming soon, with no date announced.

Have these ready

Four things cover every common stall we see:

• Your business registration number. In the US that's your EIN; in the UK your Companies House number. OpenAI verifies your business during signup.
• A company card. Ad spend bills to it at OpenAI directly — Serge never touches your billing.
• Your website URL — OpenAI reviews the site your ads will land on.
• A favicon on your site, at least 128×128. OpenAI's review requires one, and it's the cheapest rejection to prevent in advance.

Three settings are permanent

The rules of thumb: set the country you bill from, the currency you'll be billed in, and the time zone your team works in.

Creating the account

Go to ads.openai.com and create the account with your business details. You own it and its billing from the first minute; nobody — Serge included — can create it for you, because OpenAI prohibits agency-created accounts.

Business verification runs during signup, against the registration number above. It usually clears in a few days and runs on OpenAI's clock — the wait is normal, not a problem. You can come back to Serge in the meantime; nothing on our side blocks on it.

The site review

Before ads can serve, OpenAI reviews the site they land on. The rejections we actually see are almost always fixable in minutes on your side:

• OpenAI's crawler was blocked — usually bot protection or robots.txt. Allowlist it and re-request review.
• The landing page didn't load or didn't respond as a regular web page. Check the URL serves an ordinary page.
• No favicon on the site. Add one (at least 128×128) and re-request review.

The Ads API key

When your account exists, your Ads API key lives at ads.openai.com under Settings. Create one for the ad account and paste it into Serge's connect page. Careful: this is the Ads key from ads.openai.com — not a platform.openai.com model key.

That key is the only access Serge holds. No Serge user is added to your account, it's checked with a read-only call before it's stored, it's stored encrypted, and revoking it in your Settings cuts Serge off instantly.

What Serge does from there

Serge sets up your campaigns on your own account — created paused, spending nothing until you enable them at ads.openai.com — installs the tracking that ties every ad click to what it returned on your site, and shows the platform's numbers next to your own count. Your card, your caps, your account, always.